advertising is basically branding. branding is about strategic marketing. and strategic marketing bases itself on psychology, whether it focuses on personality psychology, or social psychology, it depends on the product and on the image that it wants to convey.
people do not wonder about m&m's, a popular chocolate staple in our inventory of high calorie diet's message because it is plain and simple. with its colorful pieces it is obviously a marketing strategy that aims to induce hunger and variety on its target market, the children, with its end goal of increased consumption (for a related reasearch, take a look at my paper about the effect of the variety on food preference). add the familiar ernie and bert colored peanut and plain flavored m&m for brand retainability purposes, and finally, its catchphrase "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" catchphrase, and you got one effective product branding.
another similar existing product is NIPS. innocently packaged as an alternative to the popular m&m's, one could not help but think about its impact (whether supraliminal or subliminal) on children's cognition, especially that this product has no mascot for visual retainability other than its colorful candies (an obvious rip-off to the mainstream m&m's), and it only has literary advertisments seen in aged commercials to back it up.
this research aims to deconstruct the branding of the said product, to analyze its social implications, specifically to the children, and finally, fill the void of knowledge in the field of developmental psychology, specifically on the effects of the branding of food to the childen's cognitive processes later in life.
due to time, resource, and motivational constraints, this research is limited only to basic literary analysis. a review of related literature, inline citations, are not possible. however, it is fortunate that this author was able to obtain a piece of literary advertisment of the said product, and careful dissection of its meaning is possible.
using jaques derrida's deconstructivism as an analytical tool for our one and only piece of hard data thus enables us to examine the manifest, latent, social (and political), and finally devonstructive levels of meaning of the said "jingle".
Wanna see what happens in a bag of nips
What goes on before it touch my lips
They make a rainbow, chocolate nips
A choco rainbow, chocolate nips
And then they color all the flowers
And became a tree....
presented before you is the advertisement jingle of NIPS. its manifest content speaks for itself.
when it comes to its latent content however, different interpretations arise. examining its first line, one cannot help but think on the meaning of bag of nips. what is nips really? what other interpretations can we have for it being in a bag?
recall what when we were in our prepubescent years, this was the time when our pituitary glands begin to send signals to our gonads to produce hormones to initiate the growth of our primary and secondary sexual characteristics. among those are the growth of beards, the advent of menarche, and particularly, the growth of the breasts. before the full growth of the female breasts, (for a related research on breasts, see my paper about the effect of breast size on male and female teenager interaction) it beggins with a budding or puffing of the female nipple. this "puff" is fondly teased girl cohorts (take note, GIRL cohorts only. why are male not included you say, pre-teen boys are simply not interested in budding nipples, barely poking out through girl's trainer sandos. again, read my research about the breast size and social interactions) as "grapes". one can only assume that it is because of its resemblance. the author has no way of determining the factuality of the said monicker. another popular monicker that girl cohorts dub for this budding protuberance is "nips", a shortened name for nipple, because it connotes the meaning "little nipple".
a bag on the other hand is simply a receptacle. but putting it in its literary context, it is possible that the bag is used as a receptacle for the nips, in its latent meaning, an object that holds the young woman's budding nipple. what else could it be other than a trainer bra or a sando bra? this solves the latent meaning of the first line of this jingle unfit to be heard and comprehended by the children's innocent psyche.
could it be possible that this rainbow chocolate alternative brands itself as a young woman's budding nipple? it could just might possibly be. latent content analysis of the succeeding lines allows us to put more rationalization.
[end of part 1]
No comments:
Post a Comment